[iwar] [fc:Web.hooligans.hurt.search.for.clues]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-23 08:19:00
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 08:19:00 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Web.hooligans.hurt.search.for.clues]
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Web hooligans hurt search for clues

By Joe Salkowski, Chicago Tribune, 10/23/2001
<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/printedition/chi-0110220010oct22.story?coll=chi%2Dprintbusiness%2Dhed">http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/printedition/chi-0110220010oct22.story?coll=chi%2Dprintbusiness%2Dhed>

Most Americans felt a need to do something--anything, really--in the
wake of the Sept.  11 terrorist attacks.  Hackers are no different. 

In the days after the World Trade Center fell, thousands of programmers,
systems administrators and other high-tech types volunteered their
services to help rebuild networks destroyed in the incidents.  But just
as some ignorant souls have lashed out at innocent Muslims, a group of
anonymous keyboard cowboys have responded to the attacks by mounting a
senseless campaign against the Internet itself. 

These so-called hackers have defaced sites posted by Islamic groups and
mounted denial-of-service attacks against machines in the Middle East. 
Someone even took down a network for customers in the Philippines,
apparently because the service provider operates under a vaguely Arabic
name. 

This sort of mischief is more than just annoying.  Indeed, these
clueless vigilantes might be getting in the way of catching actual
terrorists. 

"They're not only disturbing the Internet itself, they're disturbing our
intelligence gathering," said Parry Aftab, executive director of an
Internet safety organization called Cyber Angels.  "If you're trying to
home in on the discussions of some particular terrorist and someone
slows down the network or shuts it down, there goes months worth of
`spidering.' That's a problem."

Cyber Angels volunteers are among a handful of private sector
programmers who have been asked by government investigators to use
automated Web-crawling "spiders" and other tools to track evidence of
terrorist activity online. 

Aftab won't discuss their progress, but she's worried their work will be
undermined by reckless freelance hackers who crash networks or release
viruses, worms and other damaging programs. 

"People are angry.  And when they're angry, they just lash out at
anybody," Aftab said.  "There's been a huge increase in malicious code
activity out there.  That disrupts the network, and that just makes it
harder for us to protect the national security interest."

Cyber Angels, a group with 10,000 volunteers in 76 countries, is
responding to the problem with a novel approach.  Instead of merely
criticizing these misguided hackers, the group is trying to recruit
them. 

Aftab asked Internet forefather Vint Cerf to record public service
announcements inviting these lone coders to join Cyber Angels and start
restoring the reputation of hackers. 

"Historically, a `hacker' was a very honorable engineer, someone who
wanted very much to understand and make use of the network in a
constructive way," Cerf says in one spot.  "People who abuse the network
give the lie to that term, and I hope you won't do that."

New recruits won't be joining the search for terrorists themselves,
Aftab said.  Instead, they'll be asked to help sniff out the "script
kiddies," "crackers" and others whose destructive behavior is damaging
the Web at a time when communication is more important than ever. 

"We want them to realize that stopping what they're doing is patriotic,"
she said. 

Cyber Angels isn't the only group spreading this message.  A group of
German hackers who call themselves the Chaos Computer Club made a
similar pitch at a conference held days after the attacks.  Computer
security experts have echoed that call, though one said media reports
shouldn't refer to such vigilante hacking as "cyberterrorism."

"Let's get real here," wrote Elizabeth Zwicky of Counterpane Internet
Security Inc.  "What we're seeing is cyberhooliganism: the cyber
equivalent of phoning in phony bomb threats and throwing dead rats at
people in turbans.  It's horrible, it's despicable, it causes genuine
damage, and it ought to be stopped."

Aftab said she hopes the ad campaign helps mitigate any negative
impressions of the Internet that might have been created by the
vigilante hacking. 

"The Internet allowed us to reach out to the victims' families, to help
them find the legal information they need and to search for information
that might find who did this," said Aftab. 

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